My favorite garden center went out of business last summer, and I’m still heartbroken. It was a family business that had been around for more than 50 years. It already hit me hard in December when I couldn’t go there to peruse their beautiful Christmas ornament selection. It was the best in the city.
Now that spring is upon us I constantly find myself pining away for them. Besides houseplants, tools and seeds, they had a beautiful selection of perennials and roses. In fact most of the roses I grow came from that garden center. They also sold just about every kind of culinary herb you can imagine, and I’ve yet to find a better collection of interesting tomato and pepper cultivars.
I’ll really miss their annuals. They sold the common bedding plants—petunias, impatiens, marigolds, snapdragons, alyssum, etc., but they also had a dizzying array of sun coleus and specialty cultivars of salvias, rudbeckias, ageratums and verbenas (among others). They were always willing to sell new and exciting plants along with the tried and true.
I won’t be able to rely on them for emergencies anymore either. They always did a second sowing of bedding plants a little later in winter so there would be good-looking “emergency” and “filler” annuals available through June. If you suffered a garden mishap from storms or rodents you always knew you could find a healthy, robust replacement plant to fill that bare patch of soil.
Since I won’t be able to buy verbena bonariensis plants from them this year, I’ve sprouted my own. So far they’re doing well.
But it’s probably goodbye to the beautiful lisianthus flowers I purchased there every spring. Sowing lisianthus plants from seed can take 22 to 24 weeks. Even I have my seed-sowing limits.
Fortunately, the closing was a family decision, and they went out on their own terms. But the void they’ve left in the heart of many area gardeners is going to be felt for years.